Behind the Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape

Introduction

In January of 2017, just days after Bears Ears National Monument was proclaimed in southeast Utah, I had the immense privilege of being invited to an event celebrating its establishment at Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation.

I was living in Cortez, Colorado, at the time—just about halfway between my two on-again, off-again homes of Flagstaff, Arizona, and Salt Lake City, Utah—and had to make the long, cold drive by myself. My route took me around Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, a Bill Clinton creation from 2000 that was proclaimed in order to protect 175,100 acres of the San Juan region—the vast drainage basin of the San Juan River, centered on the Four Corners, of which Bears Ears is the westernmost natural and cultural province.

It had snowed recently. The final stretch through the northernmost portion of the Navajo Nation was thickly blanketed in white, and my vehicle pirouetted less than gracefully during the dozen or so times that I lost control of it. I wondered how many people were willing to make this perilous journey just to celebrate the recent proclamation of a national monument when they could easily wait until the snow melted and go see the place itself. The answer, when I finally arrived, turned out to be hundreds.

I carried a notebook with me. I often do. The notes I took at the celebration were added to an assemblage of scribblings comprising about thirteen years of thoughts, observations, experiences, and archaeological research focused on southeast Utah.

My first encounter with what would become Bears Ears National Monument was in 2006. I was not yet an archaeologist—merely an aficionado of the old and interesting. I spent a week in November backpacking through the upper third of Grand Gulch, the great defile that cuts through the impressive land mass of Cedar Mesa beneath the gaze of the Bears Ears formations. Much of my time was spent marveling over how scarcely visited such a wondrous and heavenly place could be. In the four days I spent down in the Gulch and three additional days spent atop Cedar Mesa, I saw exactly three other people, including a fellow backpacker to whom I gave a ride between trailheads so he could complete a loop. We hardly said a word to each other.

That was then. Things have changed quite a bit. By the time I got involved in research and conservation efforts in the Bears Ears area, I was paying off a rather sizable karmic debt that I felt I owed the place. And it isn’t scarcely visited, anymore.

Early archaeologists like Alfred A. V. Kidder—that tendency of going by the first two initials in publication is a venerated one among archaeologists—regarded the entire San Juan region as a single culture area. The archaeologically recognized Bears Ears Culture Area, or simply the Bears Ears area, is the westernmost portion of the northern hemisphere of the San Juan world, sometimes also known as the Mesa Verde region.

That’s important. As archaeology has progressed upward from consideration solely of artifacts, to consideration of sites, to consideration of communities, to consideration of culture areas, and finally to consideration of landscapes and regions,* archaeologists have come to appreciate that no accurate portrayal of human sociocultural anything can be fully understood at less than a regional scale. To understand the history and cultures of the Bears Ears area, especially during the ancient and slightly more recent precontact time periods, it has to be seen in the context of the San Juan region as a whole.

This is a running theme in the developing world of American archaeology, and a major subtheme of this book is the role that Bears Ears has played—and continues to play—in the story of that development.

The other two subthemes are the cultural history of the place itself and the story of my own unlikely involvement there, which interdigitate and converge in a number of intriguing ways. It makes for long chapters, as these three subthemes and the narrative arcs they describe are explored in a gradually tightening weave, but there’s a reason. My hope is that telling the human story of the place in such a way will lead the reader into a deeper understanding of why it is so important to so many people.

Despite its foundation and reliance on research of a decidedly technical nature, the format and style of this book are more like mainstream wilderness writing than niche academic composition. This, too, is a stylistic departure—or so it might appear. Whether writing for a general audience or for the academy, archaeologists all too often comprise their work of dry, technical authorship dripping with citations and stuffed with incomprehensible jargon that acts as a gauntlet against intruders.

Meanwhile, here is Frederick H. Chapin—early American polymath with a penchant for business, mountaineering, photography, and what passed for archaeology in his days—writing about the archaeology of the San Juan region in his book The Land of the Cliff-Dwellers back in 1892:

The light of noonday floods the walls of the ramparts, and penetrates into the deep recesses of the cave; but, as the sun sinks westward, a dark shadow creeps across the front of the cavern, and the interior is in deep gloom. It is then that the explorer, standing among the crumbled walls and gazing up at the loop-holes above, or following with his eye the course of the cañon down to its end where it joins the greater gorge, wonders what events happened to cause this strong fortress to be deserted or overthrown.

Effective public scholarship includes generous scoops of both the entertaining and the humanistic. The only thing that appears to be in short supply in the sciences these days is public scholarship itself.

That’s especially problematic for archaeology. To my knowledge, no other science has to contend in the public realm with monsters as formidable as Indiana Jones, Ancient Aliens, and religious and ideological interpretations that span the gamut from annoyingly appropriative to awesomely racist. Compound that with the equally terrifying threat of inadvertently hastening the destruction of archaeological sites by romanticizing and advertising them, and we’ve got quite a challenge on our hands.

Southeastern Utah practically overflows with archaeological relics, including photogenic ones like cliff dwellings. I first read about Cedar Mesa, heartland and crown jewel of the Bears Ears area in terms of archaeology, in David Roberts’ In Search of the Old Ones while working as a seasonal restaurant manager at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. As they did (and still do) with Edward Abbey and the book he wrote about Arches, a lot of people have criticized Roberts for writing a little too lovingly about the place he loved so much—thereby exacerbating the subsequent tourist crush. Evidently, what they both should have written was: This place sucks, just a bunch of rocks, too many goddamn cedar gnats, go to Disney World instead! Maybe some places are just too wonderful to write about…?

Maybe. Although, I don’t see throngs of tourists stampeding all over Jack London’s Yukon trying to make friends with wolves. Nor have the copious and impassioned writings of Jacques Cousteau inspired vast hordes of poor swimmers to drown trying to follow in his flipper wake.

But inspiration can’t be entirely discounted, either. I first learned about Grand Gulch from a book, after all—and then got even more excited about the place when I read Ann Zwinger wax sweetly about it in her own book Wind in the Rock. According to a handful of sources, A Walk in the Woods and Wild brought unprecedented numbers to the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, respectively. Not surprisingly, about half of those sources included cheers and much rejoicing over how the United States still has so much wilderness for people to enjoy, while the other half included foaming snarls and teeth-gnashing over the grim specter of overcrowding.

I can see both arguments. On the one hand, the great undeveloped outdoors in North America is—and, hopefully, shall remain—so vast and copious that the notion of its ever getting too dense with visitors borders on derangement. On the other hand, overcrowding is a big problem in bottleneck areas where people tend to throng like storybook lemmings after they’ve been pointed out. You can walk the entirety of the Grand Canyon’s inner gorge without seeing much more than a handful of other people, for example, but you can’t walk fifty yards from the gift shop to the South Rim without seeing much fewer than a gazillion of them.

Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that anyone can do about that. Amazing places invariably attract visitors, and most of them share their experiences with others through one means or another, and so it goes whether we laud or lament. This is especially true in what was supposed to be the Space Age but has, in fact, turned out to be the Information Age. A time in which secrets aren’t really an option, anymore—at least not when those secrets are, in a very real sense, just sitting there waiting for the next person to find them.

The death of place comes for everywhere, eventually. You can whine about it, or you can take steps to mitigate its impacts, but the one thing you can’t do is stop it.

Moreover, the archaeological splendors of the Bears Ears area have attracted a lot more than just tourists. They attracted some of the earliest of what are very generously called archaeologists back in the late 1800s, followed by a lot of what are more matter-of-factly called looters. The varied natural splendors of the area have also attracted uranium speculators, oil and gas developers, herders of both cattle and sheep, miners, loggers, and—for one brief but lively moment in the late 1990s—armed revolutionary wackos.

Long before all that, however, the Bears Ears area attracted people for different reasons. Very different reasons, from one era to the next, although whatever that attracting power was, it never wavered. Still hasn’t.

That attractive element both underscores and precipitates what I consider the most intriguing aspect of the place: a borderlands phenomenon, so beautifully expressed there. At almost every given instance in its spectacular prehistory, history, and modernity, the Bears Ears area is the interdigitating limit where different peoples meet, articulate, and assume entirely new and novel sociocultural expressions within what is operatively a cultural crucible that never cools.

Let me say a few more words about prehistory.

Like most modern, progressive types in the field of anthropology (archaeology being a subfield of anthropology in the US), I dislike the term because that prefix pre- implies that the people in question have no real history. Which is patently ridiculous, since literally everything is a result of the history that came before it.

The term is arguably racist to boot, depending upon who’s using it in reference to whom. In professional usage, it refers to the time period before written history, which in North America means all the stuff that happened before Europeans arrived with parchment and quill. But there’s a caveat to even that simple explanation: the Spanish and Spanish-speaking Mexicans aren’t often included in it, despite their often-copious written accounts, so in the American Southwest history officially begins after the end of the Mexican-American War in about 1850. All of which seems silly to me, given the astounding temporal stretches chronicled by Indigenous oral histories. But, alas, it’s what I’ve got to work with.

On a related note: throughout this book you will see non-Western cultures, beliefs, and histories described almost entirely in Western terms. Which sucks because, as with nutrient energy, you invariably lose a lot of quality when it gets metabolized through alien systems. It simply isn’t possible to talk or read about other cultures in terms of your own language and concepts with anything even close to total accuracy. Imagine trying to describe the process of baking bread entirely in terms of boiling soup, and you’ll have some idea what I mean.

In fact, as Diné politician, scholar, and activist Eric Descheenie once pointed out to me, the very concept conveyed by the term culture is itself completely foreign to Indigenous North American knowledge systems—let alone that of more loaded terms like nation, tribe, or sacred.

Unfortunately, there’s only one set of tools in our collective toolbox at present, so it’s the one I’m forced to use. But that dejected pronouncement comes with its own caveat: for the reasons just described, knowledge of non-Western peoples that comes wrapped in Western packaging should always be treated as starting points to understanding rather than end points. A foundation, in other words, on which a multiplicity of perspectives might be built, as opposed to a concrete and dogmatic edifice to be venerated on its own.

When writing about the place in 1946, Wallace Stegner described southeastern Utah as the heart of our last great wilderness. This is not real tourist country, he went on to say, and at the time he wasn’t wrong. The first automobile had reached the vicinity of Mexican Hat, at its southernmost extent, in 1921—and in the two decades between that historic event and when Stegner penned his words, very few had followed it.

Edward Abbey, always eager to see what his hero Stegner had seen, penetrated into the area in a rattletrap beast in the 1950s, and then immediately began howling about how nobody should ever build a highway into it (the road he took was less than a decade old). Ann Zwinger followed soon after, and although she was never as fierce and ribald as her friend and fellow author Cactus Ed, she also lamented what she knew was coming.

The road Abbey took into the area in some of his earliest essays was built in the 1950s to accommodate uranium exploration. The road Ann took a little later to reach Grand Gulch was built to shorten the distance that same uranium had to be hauled. And every scientist, hiker, backpacker, photographer, artist, poet, logger, grazer, weirdo, cop, and grave robber has taken those same roads ever since.

On that snowy morning in January of 2017, I took the long but scenic route along one of them to an event celebrating an arduous and ongoing effort to protect the place.

In attendance were folks from nearly all the Native American tribes in the region, along with a smattering of white conservationists and other allies like me. Nonprofit groups represented there included Utah Diné Bikéyah, Friends of Cedar Mesa, Archaeology Southwest, and Conservation Lands Foundation, all of whom would be co-litigants on a lawsuit filed against the Trump administration when it moved to eviscerate the monument a year later.

The speakers were all members of the tribes. Eric Descheenie talked about his then-current career as a Diné politician in Phoenix living far away from his homeland, as well as about how Bears Ears National Monument was an especially symbolic win for women because of the area’s feminine healing energy. Navajo Nation Council delegate Davis Filfred reported being thankful from the bottom of [his] boots, commenting later on how he’d gotten the council to pass legislation supporting the monument. Shaun Chapoose, chairman of the Ute Indian (Uinta-Ouray) Tribe Business Committee and one of the most fiery speakers I know of, delivered an exceptional polemic about the importance of the monument and how he hoped Trump would be too busy building his Great Wall to trifle with it. I never tire of that man’s wit.

The speech that affected me the most, however, was from Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, former Ute Mountain Ute council-member and co-chairwoman of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. We’re pals at this point, appearing alongside each other in a number of publications, but I’d never met her before the celebratory gathering in Monument Valley. She recalled being horribly disrespected and ridiculed by the Utah congressional delegation when she and other tribal members testified on Capitol Hill about the urgent need to create elevated protections for the Bears Ears area. As it turned out, she was the first coalition member called when the new monument was designated, and she’d had one hell of a time trying not to blurt the news out to everyone in the world before it was officially announced. It was a touching—and, given her treatment by Utah’s finest, vindicating—story.

Regina also emphasized that everyone who knows that place is deeply and invariably moved by it; that we all have our Bears Ears stories as a result; and how she wants to hear each and every one of them. I pondered that as I drove back through the wondrous and towering monoliths of Monument Valley and southeastern Utah, now a shimmering blue from moonlight on snow and ice. It was the honor of a lifetime to be invited to the coalition’s event in the first place. To eat the food they served (made with herbs and such that were presciently gathered at Bears Ears the previous fall) and watch them laugh at the coyote pups playing in front of the speakers. This was about the midway point in my own involvement in the conservation battle, and it was about to ramp up in a pretty big way—but that event was, and remains, the most instructive part.

This book is my response to Regina’s request.

* At the same time, scientific methods have spiraled ever downward in scale from jars and mummies, to tree rings and pollen, to phytoliths and other microscopic crystalline things, to trace elements, to atomic isotopes.

Chapter One: The Mammoth-Killers

The human story of the Bears Ears area begins rather far away from the place itself. So does the story of Bears Ears archaeology. And so, for that matter, does my own.

As far as scientists can tell, humans first arrived in the American Southwest no later than about fourteen thousand years ago and quite possibly a lot earlier than that. Hypotheses about their methods of arrival vary considerably, although it’s clear that people didn’t evolve here from our last common ancestor with the other primates. Biological studies point instead to northeastern Asia, and a great many Indigenous narratives also include migration from someplace to the north. Exactly how and when have been subjects of ongoing debate for decades, and this has a lot to do with how archaeologists operate.

Because it’s usually impossible to discern cultures or societies from the purely material record, particularly in cases where all that remain are bones and stone tools, archaeologists typically give typologies or groupings of styles umbrella titles called material cultures, and sometimes artifact complexes or traditions. This approach is useful for building chronologies, but becomes a bit more troublesome when one tries to move from describing things to understanding people.

The earliest known artifact tradition in the Americas is the Nenana Complex, so-called because of a site found in the Nenana Valley in Alaska, and the people who created it appear to have thrived sometime before and up to about 11,500 years ago. Overlapping this in mainland North America are the Clovis and Western Stemmed traditions—the latter restricted to the Great Basin region of Nevada and western Utah, and the former being found throughout the entirety of North America. This by itself is enough to convince most researchers that the first people to arrive in North America stepped off the boat, or dogsled, or whatever it was up in modern-day Alaska, and then worked their way downward. The keyword being most.

These artifact traditions fall into what most American archaeologists call the Paleoindian period, which represents adaptations to terminal Pleistocene environments and is characterized by small groups of relatively mobile foragers who used most sites only briefly or infrequently. The Paleoindian toolkit typically included large lanceolate (long and thin) projectile points, spurred-end scrapers, gravers, and borers or awls—and, in the case of the Western Stemmed tradition, mysterious little crescents that look like fake moustaches. The primary difference among these artifact traditions themselves is the slight variability exhibited in projectile point form, which likely resulted from changing environments and subsistence strategies but may just as likely have been components of group identity.

The Clovis complex takes its name from the site where it was first discovered, when a road crew in eastern New Mexico stumbled upon an assemblage of very large and very old bones, mixed into which were a number of slender, delicate-looking projectile points about as long as an adult finger. Clovis points are beautiful, intricate, and above all delicate things. Some researchers have looked good and hard at their design, and concluded that they’re about as useful against a charging beast the size of a U-Haul as a pocket knife would be against a bulldozer. Which means they were either intended as very pretty trade items, or as very pretty knives for carving up animals that were already dead. Or both. But almost certainly not for spearing live ones.

When scientists began using modern radiocarbon dating on Clovis-associated materials, starting with the dead animals with which Clovis points were associated and moving on to excavated perishable organics, they were delighted to discover that they coincide perfectly with the retreat of the great ice sheets that covered the landmass between mainland North America and northeastern Eurasia roughly fourteen thousand years ago. The retreat of those glaciers created an ice-free corridor along the Rocky Mountains that channeled the wandering Pleistocene hunter-gatherers into the heart of the continent. Once there, they migrated outward, reaching every nook and cranny in both North and South America within about five hundred years—or roughly 1/200th the amount of time it took anatomically modern humans to cross the same distance between our collective homeland in Africa and northwestern Eurasia in the first place. As crazy and unlikely as that sounds, current evidence suggests that it’s true. One can only assume the Clovis people were full-time sprinters.

Researchers have found and documented something like ten thousand Clovis artifacts, which means there may be as many as ten thousand more lurking in the closets of sticky-fingered ne’er-do-wells. Clovis is known best as the material culture associated with the first people to arrive in mainland North America some thirteen thousand years ago, the operative word being in quotations because it gets challenged more or less constantly.

Mounting evidence shows that people were in the Americas at least a few thousand years before Clovis, further underscoring the unlikelihood of what I call the Continental Sprinter Hypothesis. Confidently dated pre-Clovis sites appear on an almost yearly basis. Most researchers now consider the Clovis First model dead and buried, with many having felt that way for well over a decade at this point, much to the satisfaction of Native American scholars who’ve doubted/hated it all along. Although this never stops journalists from trotting out the rewrite history meme every time a new one is found. In following with Betteridge’s Law,* anytime you see the clickbait-y headline [blank] could rewrite history, put your money on but probably not.

The scientific, historic, and cultural importance of Clovis itself—and the growing number of sites that predate it—cannot be understated. However, apart from one site (and possibly a second), the role that Clovis plays in the Bears Ears area is a small one. So far. Ongoing research hints that there may be more to that story.

Following Clovis, the Folsom tradition is also associated with distinctive spear points. They had grooves or flutes that extended from the concave base almost to the very tip, not entirely unlike the blood grooves in some medieval swords, but nearly as wide as the blade itself.

The Folsom complex was discovered just over twenty years before the discovery of Clovis, and it also took place in New Mexico. In 1908, a cowboy named George McJunkin, investigating damages to his ranch after a devastating flood that killed eighteen people, stumbled across the rib bones of a gigantic bison in an arroyo bed into which the flood had deeply cut. In among the bones were a number of stone tools, including fluted projectile points that look to us now like miniaturized versions of Clovis points with flared tangs that make them look a bit like Pac-Man ghosts. McJunkin, being no fool, recognized that he was looking at something that might be of interest to archaeologists, and—being as careful as possible not to disturb the integrity of the deposits—removed a few sample bones and one of the projectile points and sent them to the Denver Museum of Natural History.

It turned out that the bones were those of Bison antiquus, a species of giant bison that had followed woolly mammoths into extinction by ten-thousand years ago at the latest. The undeniable temporal connection between those bones and the Native American stone tools jumbled in with them established human antiquity of North America as being at least nine thousand years older than anyone had previously conjectured. The discovery of Clovis a few years later would push it back even further, but Folsom was the game changer.

The thing about McJunkin that warrants additional discussion is his ethnicity. He was one of the numerous but largely unsung Black cowboys in American western history. Born into slavery in Texas, he was nine years old when the Civil War came to an end, and he made his way thence into the world of cowpunching. He was far from alone in this. When freedom for Africans in America (finally) came about with the Thirteenth Amendment, a large number of them headed west to work as cowhands because the east was [a] full of racists and bad memories, and anyway [b] distinctly lacking in jobs for them outside of porter or elevator operator.

Other Black people who helped shape the American West during the historic period include Bass Reeves, Robert Smalls, Mary Fields, Nat Love, and Bill Bulldog Pickett, all of whom are worth at least an afternoon of reading and probably a Hollywood film of their own.

Paleoindian archaeology is sparse throughout the Colorado Plateau, Bears Ears being no exception, and one of the biggest reasons for this is something researchers call taphonomy. This is the process by which an organism is fossilized and the study of what happens to it between its death and subsequent discovery. It’s a term coined and used by paleontologists, who actually study fossils, but it’s been successfully hijacked by other studiers of natural history—including archaeologists—for their own purposes. Generally speaking, it’s the study of site formation with regard to organic physical remains, and in most cases that means what happens to your bones and belongings after you come a cropper.

Taphonomy and its study can best be understood by envisioning a Thanksgiving dinner. These are typically attended by ten to twenty people of varying ages, and about half as many different food items from which to take slices and gobs; there are several dozen ceramic plates and bowls, and numerous metal utensils; there are glass drinking cups, and paper napkins, and so on. There’s also a big table, candles on the table, seats around the table, music playing in the background, and sometimes dogs, which will turn out to be important later on because dogs always are.

The feast commences. The feast ends.

The things that wind up in the trash are the bones, the soft or gooey items that got scraped off plates because of eyes bigger than stomachs, the napkins, and whatever plates, bowls, and glasses happened to break. And then the dogs get into the trash, so most of the organic morsels—and, given what I know about dogs, a lot of the napkins and maybe some of the glass—disappears. What remains goes into the outdoor trash can, at which point a raccoon makes off with the shiny things and whatever bones the dogs couldn’t choke down. Come then the birds, and insects, and grubs, and bacteria… By the time the detritus of our hypothesized Thanksgiving feast arrives at its final resting place, it consists of a few turkey leg bones that were too big for any scavengers to handle and a small pile of broken dishes. And from that, archaeologists are expected to recreate the feast, the family, the setting, the music, and so on.

This is the problem of taphonomy. If the feast occurred yesterday, archaeologists could just ask people about it. Testimony would be hazier if it occurred a year or two ago, but photos might exist. Ten years ago, and at least the table and chairs and most of the people themselves are still around, albeit with a dusty sheen on all. But one hundred years ago? The furniture has probably been replaced more than once, and most likely the house and the people as well. How about one thousand years ago? Or ten thousand?

So, part of the reason that Paleoindian archaeological materials are so sparse is because Paleoindian people were squishy bipeds who didn’t drive cars or build skyscrapers, instead relying on animal skins and ephemeral huts and whatever food they managed to collect or clobber with simple tools. Precious little of that is going to endure in open settings for over a hundred centuries. And, owing to the process of taphonomy, what does remain is often little more than what you get at the end of our hypothesized Turkey Day trash narrative: a few broken tools and the really big bones.

Archaeological literature on Paleoindian lifeways has traditionally emphasized big-game hunting for this very reason, to the extent of postulating that over-exploitation of Pleistocene megafauna that hadn’t yet learned to fear humans led directly to the extinction of those animals throughout the continent. This so-called Overkill Hypothesis has been challenged in more recent literature, and I personally think it’s a case of correlation not equaling causation. People were inspired to move great distances into uncharted and potentially very scary places at the same time that these huge and hard-to-feed animals began to die off, after all, so it’s much more likely that a lurking variable like climatic pandemonium was the primary impetus of both.

The other main reason folks like the ones who left Clovis and Folsom artifacts behind are so often characterized as obligate big-game hunters is because Paleoindian-associated artifacts most often occur in lower elevations along major river valleys, where Pleistocene megafauna liked to congregate. This includes the original Clovis site itself in Blackwater Draw, New Mexico. But water is a pretty good place to congregate. I would be more surprised to find that the artifacts of a hunting-and-gathering people most often occur, say, on the tops of mountains. And, as of this writing, only about a dozen kill sites are known from the entire Clovis assemblage continent-wide. So, I’d hardly say they were leaning on hunted megafauna as the sole meat component of their respective meat and potatoes.

Behavioral ecologists (i.e., people who study the ways in which environment and behavior have shaped one another in human and other animal species) have pretty well demolished the idea that Clovis people were obligate megafauna hunters. A diet consisting primarily of meat is a hard sell for the human body right out of the gate, although humans are amazingly adaptive and our diets can be highly variable depending on our local environments—the Inuit people, for example, really do eat a diet of almost nothing but fatty animal bits. But look where they live. Besides which, they always target and savor the half-digested vegetables in those animals’ stomachs, and narwhal skin has been found to contain more vitamin C than citrus fruit. So, yeah, it’s possible for people to subsist on a diet consisting primarily of meat, but only after many generations of adaptation to rather extreme circumstances, and in any event, that doesn’t typically include the meat of trumpeting goliaths.

Not that scavenging or hunting of megafauna never happened, of course. Confirmed mammoth kills by Paleoindian people are less common than one might think but that’s still a lot more than zero. It’s the obligate part that’s problematic.

The one confirmed Clovis site in the entire Bears Ears area is a hunting camp located not far to the west of Bluff, a colorful community situated on the San Juan River that only recently—after nearly 240 years—became incorporated as a town. The site is located near the San Juan River, which is indeed where you would expect to find Pleistocene megafauna—but also where you’d find plants, fish, ducks, and, oh yes, water. It’s basically an assemblage of stone tools and the abundant little chips of stone residue from making them—what archaeologists call a lithic scatter.

Most archaeological sites in the United State in toto are lithic scatters. This is primarily because they don’t erode or decay, like perishable organic things, and because sticky-fingered visitors are unlikely to collect pocketfuls of the archaeological equivalent of what a colleague of mine once described as pencil-sharpening shavings. Although it’s also because stone tools were a fantastic idea when human beings first invented them, and remained so for a very, very long time. As retired university professor James O’Connell once explained it to me, A good, sharp edge is ideal for two purposes: opening animals, and closing arguments.

That’s it for confirmed Clovis sites in the Bears Ears area. There aren’t any Folsom sites until you get nearer to the town of Moab well to the northeast, most likely because there weren’t any bison. Bison were to Folsom-complex foragers what gold is to Tolkien dwarfs—there’s effectively no finding the latter unless there’s a lot of the former.

But confirmed is a tricky word, in this case. Also to the west of Bluff is a rock art panel that supposedly contains at least one and possibly two mammoths, although if you look at the mammoth from almost any angle other than the one prescribed by its recorders it looks more like a dog, or an aardvark, or an antelope with a snout, or a kangaroo, or a unicorn, or a 2004 Chevy Silverado, or almost anything else your mind can imagine. You’ll find that’s a common problem with the study of rock art. Sometime between its creation and eventual discovery an errant boulder strikes a petroglyph panel just so, and subsequent hordes of experts spill bounteous ink and bile over the question of whether or not the people who carved it were involved in a cult that worshipped flying mushrooms.

Having said all that, I spend a lot of time looking at rock art, or rock writing as my Hopi friends prefer to call it, and that supposed mammoth really does look awfully mammoth-like to me. So, who knows? At any rate, the controversy over whether or not it’s genuine is a fun one.

It was discovered by genial and popular local artist Joe Pachak, who was often hired and/or volunteered to apply his considerable artistic skills to recording local archaeological petroglyph (pecked-in) and pictograph (painted-on) panels. Whilst so engaged in 2011, he spotted what he believed to be a petroglyph depicting a Columbian mammoth, one of two species of woolly mammoth formerly endemic to North America and arguably the older of the two, superimposed with what also appeared to be a Pleistocene bison.

Joe knew he’d found something big, and quickly got on the horn to professional archaeologists so they could come and have a look. Their conclusion: the panel does indeed depict a Pleistocene mammoth and bison, dating about thirteen thousand to eleven thousand years ago. In the community of Bluff, there was much rejoicing. Briefly.

Voices of dissent in the archaeological and paleontological communities popped up almost immediately. The most reliably dated mammoths in North America all date to before about eleven thousand years ago. Although the Huntington Mammoth—so-called for its discovery near Huntington, Utah, a rural community two hundred or so miles north of Bears Ears—is presumed to have died no more than 10,500 years ago. It has been called the last holdout of the mammoth extinction by its discoverer, paleontologist David Gillette. But it also lived and died near a boggy and densely vegetated lakeshore, where chewy greens were plentiful. There is zero evidence of mammoths and people living together in the much more xeric Bears Ears area, although if the folks at the Clovis site west of Bluff had migrated south through Huntington, there was at least one they might have spotted along the way.

Dating petroglyphs is also notoriously difficult. They are often just lines scratched and hammered into rock, after all—there’s nothing to date.

Researchers have weighed in on the subject in a variety of public forums. A particularly intriguing hypothesis has been advanced by noted local archaeologist Winston Hurst, who remains agnostic but hopeful, which suggests that maybe the timing isn’t all that important because people talk about, think about, and depict things out of time all the time. This is part of the reason that storytelling was invented, after all. The associated notion of cultural memory is one in which important or sacred images, stories, and songs are so vividly passed along that recipients can interpret them with considerable accuracy many generations later.

We aren’t very good at this, these days, because our technophilic culture has done to our attention spans what a belt sander does to a crayon. I can’t even remember phone numbers, anymore, now that I’ve got a device in my pocket that does it for me. But if it was a matter of retain complicated information with precision or you’ll stumble to a very unpleasant death, I’m betting we could still do it.

Furthermore, there is plentiful evidence to suggest that people living in the Bears Ears area during ancient times were well aware of how things went down in more-ancient times—and here, too, Clovis comes into the picture. In the spring of 2017, a schoolteacher was ambling around on top of Cedar Mesa when she stumbled upon a beautiful and seemingly flawless Clovis point.

That’s crazier than you might imagine. I know people who’ve devoted entire careers to studying the Paleoindian era that haven’t seen a Clovis point in the wild, let alone one that’s in pristine condition. My current employers as of this writing have a standing offer of a keg of good beer or a bottle of decent wine for the first person who finds a complete Clovis point on the job, and there’s little-to-no chance it will ever be claimed.

Thankfully, she did the right thing: after presumably freaking out with joy, she left it exactly where it was and informed Bureau of Land Management (BLM) archaeologist Don Simonis. It turns out the point was probably curated by an Ancestral Pueblo (ca. 1500 BC to AD 1492) individual or family, and was made from the beautiful tiger-striped Alibates chert that occurs in Texas and Oklahoma. Clovis points made from Alibates chert are found all over the country. They were the Toledo steel or Fabergé eggs of their time, in that they were highly distinctive of the place where they were made and essentially impossible to fake with local materials.

And ancient people were, after all, people. They liked to collect and marvel over cool old stuff the same as people do today—more so, in fact, because it was their history. This is why a small but steadily increasing number of archaeologists in the United States are, themselves, Indigenous people. And archaeology doesn’t work when there’s nothing left to look at.

This is what makes the tale of the Clovis point from Cedar Mesa so heartwarming. It’s fair to say that a fair number of individuals who stumbled across a stunning Clovis point during a hike would now have a sweet souvenir in their sock drawer. Plus, amoral thieving swine aside, even moving the thing twenty feet from where it was found in order to hide it safely under a rock would have destroyed its invaluable contextual integrity. The fact that it was found in an Ancestral Pueblo artifact scatter tells the story of how and why it got there. Move it just a few yards this way or that, and the factual storyline is broken.

Fittingly enough, it is during this earliest of material-culture chronology that we get our first glimpse of what I consider to be the most incredible and noteworthy aspect of the human history of the Bears Ears area. Called various things by various authors, what I prefer to call the borderlands phenomenon in social science, is the textured and fluctuating patterns of collision, conflict, and coalescence of different cultural groups in the places where the fringes of their respective territories overlap or interdigitate. These are the forges of culture, often the birthing places of new and unique ones that spring forth from all that elbow-rubbing.

Because these are the peripheral or backwoods portions of their total occupational footprints, far away from what social scientists call the cultural core, it’s where you’ll most often get a unique blend of both overt self-identification and fierce, sometimes zealous group loyalty.

And it makes a lot of sense to me, too. I grew up in a mobile home community, which I’m told is the nouveau-PC term for trailer park, which was just far enough outside of suburbia to be considered rural. Roughly half of my friends were independent-minded to the point that they regularly denounced their US citizenship—often very loudly, and usually at keg parties—just as often as they denounced loyalty to our school district, and they were the ones who routinely dated students from other ones. The other half, the ones you more often see on television these days, were some of the most frenetically patriotic human beings I’ve ever seen. Patriotic in terms of our school district, with concomitant hatred